Numlock Sunday: Ben Cohen on Shakespeare's Hot Hand

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, my continued conversation with Ben Cohen, a sports reporter at The Wall Street Journal and the author of the brand new book The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks.

Last week, we talked about what the “hot hand” is, how we found the science behind streaks and a few choice examples in sports, movies, and economics.

This week, Ben and I talked about two people — one unappreciated in her time, the other literally Shakespeare — and how streaks worked for them. We mainly talk about a wild thing that happened to Shakespeare and how you can find breadcrumbs of that in his work.

The Hot Hand can be found wherever books are sold. Ben can be found on Twitter, and his work in The Wall Street Journal is really great, they’re running an excerpt from the book if you …